A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel

by Kristin Fields

  Plywood bowed under someone’s weight. More than someone. Many someones. Count the voices. Yelling. No, arguing. She could tell from the tone of it but couldn’t tell how serious it was: if they were arguing over money piled on a card table with cigarettes burning in ashtrays that broke when the last hand was drawn and everyone threw down their cards, or if it was the kind of tension that struck out from the inside suddenly: A fist. An elbow. Skin on skin. Bones smashing.

  Five. Five men in the room and one invisible girl.

  “This one? No. He’s a punk kid with a smart mouth. Thinks he’s a big shot, but he won’t roll.”

  “What are you, his lawyer?” Laughing. But not from everyone. Only from two.

  “Look at him. He’s shitting his pants. Playing tough but eating his mother’s sauce every Sunday, sleeping in his big-boy bed, you know what I’m saying? Never been inside. Don’t know nothing from nobody. This one, though? That’s a different story. He knows better.”

  “He should. But he don’t.”

  “So what I’m saying is, cut this one loose. I’ll vouch for him. If he makes trouble, and he won’t, I’ll set him right. Because the way I see it, if you hurt this kid, it brings more heat, you know? He’s not gonna disappear quietly. Not in this neighborhood. Do whatever you want with the other one.”

  Her father. He was right above her, shifting his weight in a way that made the floor bend as the man bent words. You know this voice. Bedtime stories, whistling “Edelweiss” over coffee, only now it was filled with broken glass. Nails.

  And he needed help. People didn’t shift when they were on solid ground.

  Another voice: “You don’t shit where you eat.”

  Good riddance. She knew this voice, too, waited for the splash of water that didn’t come, the gurgling of the bay as it swallowed that heavy tarp. Her father had to get out of there.

  “Listen, this is a good kid. A stupid kid, but he’ll clean up. He’ll give back whatever he took from you. Make it right. Work it off till he’s square. Let him speak for himself. He’ll tell you he’s sorry. Won’t you, Ray?”

  Ray. Her father was trying to save Ray. Gia squeezed her eyes shut, closed her hands around a pebble, as a chair scraped forward.

  Whimpering. Same as when Uncle Frank grabbed a misbehaving son and brought his free hand down on his backside, shutting the boy right up.

  More whimpering, louder, without words, like screaming into a pillow. Something was happening. A chair scraped forward. Had they done that as kids? Tied their arms and legs to chairs and raced from one side of a line to the other? Yes, and now the chairs above were inching across the plywood, racing for somewhere else.

  Suddenly she imagined her father asleep in his bed and being rolled into the blankets, carried to a boat, a single cigarette tip glowing the whole way through. No, she thought. No, no, no. Get him out of there. Think, she begged her brain. She needed something else, something to distract them. Something to break the tension and catch them by surprise so her father could make a move. Something reckless. She needed Leo.

  Dirt and insulation scraped at her skin as she crawled out, tangling in her nightgown. She stumbled to her feet when there was no longer house above her, prayed they would not hear as she slipped into the freezing canal, swam across, and ran for home in the lingering haze of fire smoke. She burst into Leo’s room and saw him but didn’t really see his bruised face, swollen lip, and torn T-shirt in the dark room.

  “Explode a gas tank.” The words burst out. “Can you explode a car?”

  “What’s going on?” Agnes was in the doorway, but Leo’s head jerked up as he balled the sheet on his bed under his arm. Of course he could explode a gas tank. They pushed past Agnes, told her to stay put. Leo trailed behind her, not because he couldn’t outrun her, even like this, but because he was following her in her soaked nightgown. She thought, vaguely, how embarrassed she’d been that day at the canal with her dress suctioned to her new body and that man watching, but here she was again, drenched, stealing a bottle of lighter fluid from under the barbecue and a packet of matches, running back toward the canal and swimming across, Leo with that bedsheet above his head to keep it dry, as she prayed it wasn’t already too late. She’d been gone five minutes at most. Was that too long?

  It was quiet. The people inside could not see the new pair of sneakers walking slowly across the dirt lawn, could not see the shoes stop near one of the window cutouts and rise up on tiptoes, could not see those same sneakers run back toward Antonio’s parked car and open the gas tank. Leo bit down on his swollen lip, uncoiled the bedsheet, stuck it into the gas tank, and doused it with lighter fluid.

  The match set off a line of fire, racing for Antonio’s car as someone yelled, “Shut up!” and a chair was kicked over, hit the ground hard. Leo was too close to the car, his face full of shadows and angles, watching the fire race, eyes darting to the house and whatever was happening inside. Shuffling, stamping, more yelling. Gunshots. A smoking hole where the bullet disappeared into dirt. Leo barreled toward her. Gia gripped at pebbles, digging her fingertips into the earth, calling out her need like the trees in the story. And then the pebbles were gone. Leo threw her into the water, balled her nightgown into a fist, and didn’t let go as Gia kicked for the surface.

  The car exploded.

  Under the water, the sound was muffled, but orange burned above, curling the leaves on a tree, spreading through the unfinished houses to all the things inside.

  Eddie limped into the canal, dragging Ray behind him, wincing at the water. Both of them waded across to where a cop car was now waiting, and Eddie shoved Ray inside. It took off without lights and sirens. Eddie kept going but stopped to pick up Gia’s backpack in the street, Nonna’s blanket, turned them over in his hands like a new tool on a Swiss Army knife. He waded back across the canal with them above his head, wadding the blanket into a ball, squirting the rest of the lighter fluid on it.

  Leo crouched on the pebble beach. Suddenly Gia was beside him, watching, as Eddie struck a lighter and the blanket flamed through an empty window. Her father was a shadow in the flames, and the car burned hot on Gia’s face as Eddie waded back across, his arms above the water.

  Leo nudged her to go, but she couldn’t look away from the burning house, wondering if they’d still fill in the canal now. Numb set in with the cold until Gia couldn’t tell if any of this was real life or some kind of dream, if she’d stuck out her tongue at some point and Leo had put a melting smiley face there that had brought out all the monsters in her head, her deepest fears, because only then would it make sense that her father had risked his life just for Ray. Only then would it make sense that the men in the boat were here, just steps from her house, that they were probably still in that burning house, and if they were dead, her father had done it. Of course he had. Because he’d done it at war. She couldn’t believe he’d aimed that navy machine gun at the ocean and come back alive. But now it was true in a new, terrifying way. They were the same, him and her, because she hoped those men were dead. That they’d never again roll a person in a tarp and drop it into the bay as casually as flicking away a cigarette butt. That they’d never catch her. Or Lorraine. Or even Leo and Ray. Marsh grass or not.

  Leo was gone from the pebble beach, her father from the street. It was just her. She pressed her eyes closed, welcoming the endless black. For the second time that night, fire trucks raced to their block. The houses were a haze of smoke, making it hard for anyone who’d heard the bang or the gunshots to really know what they’d seen, and so shades closed as Gia wandered home in her soaking nightgown, teeth chattering, knowing she’d never swim in the canal again. Aunt Diane rushed down the front steps faster than Gia had ever seen her move and pulled her inside, tugged the nightgown over Gia’s head, and forced clean clothes on her. Aunt Diane washed Gia’s bleeding hand in the sink, because Aunt Diane had seen everything.

  Lorraine flashed out the door, running to Gia’s house, where Eddie was dragging one leg up the
sidewalk, pressing Gia’s knapsack to his lazy leg.

  “Take this,” Aunt Diane said, filling a bag with towels and gauze from an old army box under the sink.

  She shoved the bag into Gia’s stomach, knocking her backward. Told her to go.

  But Gia just stood there and Aunt Diane just stared as Gia took in the painted blue cabinets, the crumbs on the counter, the wet shoes on her feet, the sirens and yelling outside her head, the quiet within.

  “Am I dead?” Gia asked finally.

  “Not yet, baby,” Aunt Diane said. “You got a lot more life ahead of you.”

  For a moment, Gia was disappointed, because how many horrible things could chip at a person before they were only a shell, dust instead of the stars in the universe we were supposed to be?

  Aunt Diane hugged Gia, and she knew Diane understood because she’d seen just as many horrible things. The real Gia floated back down to the one in Aunt Diane’s arms, and so when she said, “Your father needs you,” the real Gia snapped to, dodging fire trucks and racing across the street on two thin legs with borrowed air in her lungs because her father, her father, had just saved stupid Ray, and now he was limping up the walk with one arm over Lorraine’s shoulder, but she couldn’t carry him alone. Gia wedged herself under her father’s other arm as her father called out like an animal in a trap.

  Agnes rushed toward the steps. They dragged him into the hallway, got him on the floor. Gia dumped the bag of things near Lorraine as she cut fast at the pant legs.

  “Two,” her father croaked out.

  Lorraine rolled him, searching his leg for something she couldn’t find.

  She looked at Agnes for a very long time, the two of them deciding, until Agnes nodded and pulled at the belt on Eddie’s waist until it snapped free. She folded it into a thick wad and told Eddie to bite down. Then she thought twice and grabbed a bottle from the hutch, told Eddie to drink. The liquid disappeared. He bit down on the belt as Lorraine forced apart the two bleeding halves of his leg with tweezers. Gia thought of Eddie lining cans on the fence, letting them shoot into the marsh, digging around for the cases after to see how they’d split. Now Lorraine was doing that in his leg, and she was only a nursing student who smelled like incense and had probably been sitting on a cushion listening to tambourines when this had happened. The sounds her father made cut right through her. She fell back to the living room, where she could hear but not see. It was too much to do both at once.

  “Gia. Gia, listen, OK?” Leo crouched beside her, and Gia realized she was sitting on the floor, holding the carpet between her fingers, picking at it like blades of grass. “I’m sorry, OK? I’m sorry. I’ve done some real bad shit, and everybody knows it. I don’t want to do it, OK? I don’t want to make it all wrong anymore. I made a mistake, and now I can’t take it back, Gia. But I can’t make it right here.”

  Agnes looked up, glaring at Leo over Eddie, then forced her attention back down to the tweezers and whispered something to Lorraine, told Eddie to take another drink. Leo was still talking, but Gia’s head was radio static as Lorraine dropped a bullet piece onto the floor. It was embarrassing to see her father in his underwear, biting down on his own belt. She was too numb to do anything but see facts. They were straight arrows, as clear and sharp as jellyfish stings in the ocean.

  “Shut up, Leo,” she spit. “You’ll do whatever you want to do anyway.”

  But he’d saved them. No, you saved them, Gia’s brain corrected. It didn’t make sense. Nothing did.

  “Gia, just listen, please . . .”

  But all Gia could see were bullet fragments on the floor, Agnes filling a pot with water at the sink, digging in the drawer for a clean dish towel as Lorraine threaded a needle, stabbed it through the raw flesh, and stitched, closing holes. Agnes wiped blood from Eddie’s leg, dabbed the stitches with ointment, hid the whole ugly thing away with gauze.

  Leo covered his head, still squatting, crying into the cove of his chest. If she was not so numb, she would’ve held his head up and made him watch.

  The women carried Eddie upstairs while Gia wiped the floor, ran the bullet fragments under cold water in the kitchen sink, and put them in her pocket.

  “I love you,” Lorraine told Agnes by the front door. “You’ve always . . .” Her voice broke as the two women hugged, both exhausted, their knees buckling under the weight of each other. Gia looked up from the spot she was mopping, struck by the emotion of it, and she knew. Lorraine was leaving. Not tonight. Or even within the next few weeks, but she was going away.

  The fire trucks were done, pulling away from the other side of the canal. Agnes stood in the doorway as Lorraine crossed the street. Dawn was breaking, the sun cutting an orange circle above the horizon through a haze of smoke and ash. The parakeets were gone from the line, and Gia wondered if they’d come back or if they’d gotten sick of the danger and taken off for good.

  “Leo.” Agnes kept her eyes on the sun. “It’s time to go.”

  Leo looked up from the floor, straight at Gia, wild eyed and younger looking, like a bird dropped from a nest whose wings suddenly wouldn’t work. Gia looked away.

  “Get your things,” Agnes said, her voice as calm as the orange light rising behind the trees. “You have ten minutes.”

  There were footsteps on the stairs. Drawers opened and closed. A zipper. Agnes dialed the station and told them Eddie had the flu and would likely be out for the week, then dumped the bucket of bloody water down the kitchen sink and refilled it, all before Leo came back down.

  “Gia, listen for your father, all right? If anything happens, go get Lorraine.”

  She did not look as Leo walked down the front walk and climbed into the passenger seat, as the engine started, as Agnes pulled away from the curb. Later, she would learn that Agnes drove him all the way to the Port Authority in Manhattan, the farthest Agnes had ever driven alone, and bought him a bus ticket to Florida because it was happy there and she couldn’t send her son anywhere she’d never been herself. Leo boarded without protest, took a seat by the window. Agnes came back to a parking ticket on the windshield. She laughed as she ripped it into a million little pieces and scattered them over the filthy sidewalk, and Agnes told Gia she remembered those pieces scattering, blowing in every direction, more than she remembered anything Leo had said on the ride from home to away.

  The news reported a burned-down house with two unidentified bodies inside. The police and fire departments were investigating. Two days later, the bodies were identified as Sal DiGiovanni and Antonio LaRocca, both known affiliates of the Mafia. The investigation was ongoing, but it appeared to be an internal dispute following a police sting on a local drug ring. Gia swallowed a lump, tucked the newspaper under her arm, and carried up her father’s breakfast tray, glad he was asleep when she brought it in because she couldn’t quite match the man throwing a flaming blanket into an empty house with the man who used to make Mickey Mouse pancakes. Agnes must’ve been struggling, too, because she made eggs and toast, poured coffee, and helped Eddie change the dressing on his thigh now that he was feeling better enough to be embarrassed by anyone else helping, but otherwise, she sat in the kitchen, lighting cigarettes, letting them burn out after the first few frenzied pulls, waiting for the phone to ring.

  Gia wondered if Agnes was more afraid they’d get caught or more afraid that they wouldn’t, or if she was worried about Leo in Florida, who’d called to say that he’d made it there, yes, but he’d gotten rolled at the bus terminal and could they send him some money—just a little—to hold him over until he found a job. And Agnes had listened with the phone away from her ear, squeezing her eyes shut, before placing it gently down in the holder.

  “You know,” she’d said, when she’d finally opened her eyes again and didn’t look quite as pinched. “I owe you an ice cream cake, don’t I?”

  She hurried to the drawer and pulled out money from inside the oven mitt. “And I think we could all use a little ice cream cake, don’t you?”

&nbs
p; Her hands were shaking. The mitt fell, and the money fell with it. A five fluttered under the table, singles around the fridge. Agnes scooped up the money and pressed it into Gia’s hands.

  “Go, would you? Get the best one. Let them write your name in icing and tell them to make it pretty. Whatever you want, OK?”

  Agnes wrapped her arms around her waist, forced a smile.

  It was still shocking to go outside, where black pits sat in either direction. Aunt Diane was on the porch in a floral housedress, barefoot in December, smoking a cigarette. She nodded at Gia, and Gia nodded back. She wasn’t so bad, Aunt Diane. Maybe that was why Lorraine had always taken care of her. She searched Aunt Diane’s face for a clue about what else was in store for them, but it was as chipped up and unrevealing as a river rock.

  She passed the bakery just as Big Lou was feeding the meter, trying to ignore her but fumbling with change so stupidly he dropped coins into the gutter. So she wouldn’t get her job back, and that was fine. Who could stuff cannoli after everything anyway?

  Inside, Lorraine was behind the counter, too busy to notice Gia outside, hurrying from one tray to the next as the line grew. Her hair was pulled back into a bun, but she’d tucked a spray of tiny pink flowers into her elastic. She’d seen them growing in a pot at Lorraine's new church, the buds green and only hinting at the pink inside, but seeing them in Lorraine’s hair felt like a tiny miracle, a glimmer of hope. Gia unzipped her coat, surprised by the sudden warmth those flowers had filled her with. Even if Lorraine was leaving, moving on to somewhere else to bloom, maybe that was OK. It would have to be.

  At Carvel, the girl behind the counter handed Gia a pen and paper, told her to write out in block letters what the message on the cake should be. Gia stared off for a while. What did you write when you didn’t even deserve ice cream cake or the bed you slept in? When there wasn’t anything to celebrate anymore?